Fires burned in the mountains around the Valley of the Great Salt Lake on the day I first had a chance to see this ancient inland sea of legend and lore. Smoke blew with the wind into the valley and limited visibility, but not so much that someone would notice as they drove through the perfect grid of streets that is downtown Salt Lake City, but as I looked at the mountains surrounding the city, I found I could barely see them for the grey-white haze accumulating around us.
On the westward drive to the lake access, both ground and air began to change. Salt grass sprang up sparsely from the white patches of salt that lined each side of the highway and the center median. The sun grew red behind the smoke and the view dimmed in an eerie mid-afternoon twilight glow. The light giving fire showed that it had the power to also deprive of illumination.
Mountains gradually faded into view as ghostly silhouetted giants on the left as the disappearance of everything past the raised banks to the right hinted that I now drove beside the Great Salt Lake. The appearance of a seemingly abandoned building with aging beige walls and onion domed corner towers added to the nether-worldly look and feel of this dead and fading landscape. But since no other buildings were visible, the turn-out at this building seemed to be the first real chance at accessing the water.
The walkway to a marina now abandoned to the invading smoke was lined with large bushes netted from top to bottom with a think fabric of webs and their captured quarry of brine flies. I took the path to the right of this area toward the water. Along this walkway, lethargic seagulls stood and stared zombie-like at nothing in particular. Not a muscle moved, and not an eye of any of these silent sentinels blinked as I walked past.
There was no softness to the sand on the beach. The crust on the surface cracked under my weight as I walked on it, but the salt so permeated it that it never really broke or gave way. The smell of death wafted from the outer edges of this brownish beach, then faded as I approached the edge of the silver-grey water.
Water it is, but has water in any other place ever moved like this? Perhaps the fatigue of the surface of the lake was the source of the lethargy of the birds. Far from free moving, ripples trudged along the surface as if through a thick soup, coming only at long intervals leaving a dead stillness on the surface in between. The ripples visible through the surface were in the hard, salt encrusted sand that formed the floor of this lifeless body of water.
In the distance was a partially shrouded island which disappeared along with the lake into the haze of the distance. Standing here with the quiet ripples of the thick water lapping silently at my feet and staring off into the gloom that swallowed the lake well before the horizon, it was easy to envision a tall, thin cloaked man slowly poling a shallow flat bottomed boat from the smog toward those standing and waiting on this bank. The occasional smell of death from the beach behind could make those waiting believe that indeed, they had passed that divide, and now stood waiting for that grim gatherer and transporter to take them to the great, veiled unknown.
But this would not be that day for me. It was easy enough after wading in the water and feeling the salt crystallize on my skin to turn back toward where I had parked, identify the smell of the beach with the tiny brine shrimp that had been trapped by the retreating water, see the brine flies that the gulls waited for, and return from this dead and smoky milieu to the city, and to the plane which would carry me again to the fertile valleys where my loved ones awaited.
Author's notes: This was my first view of the Great Salt Lake on July 11, 2007. I've since returned when there was no smoke, and the mood was much different. This first impression challenged my descriptive writing ability, so it is what I wanted to share.
Here are some photos for you to judge how I did:
Ghostly Horizon
Island in the gloom
Slow ripples in the thick water
Onion domed building
Salt grass growing in the salt
Adding your comment:
